Not only did I find a tutorial video (see below) but, with it coming in at 2 minutes and 35 seconds long, I found a very SHORT one at that… and miracle of miracles, it was easy to understand and follow. Less than ten minutes later, I’d successfully chroma keyed my first photo. Yay, me! :)

I combined these two photos…

To get this photo…

Why did I do this? I needed to see if my homemade greenscreen would work, because I’m going to start video blogging again and this time I wanted to have different backdrops behind me to liven things up a bit, at least visually, anyway. I haven’t done a vlog in several months. I hadn’t been feeling well (fibro flare), and I also had to try to find a new place after I decided not to renew my lease in Sandy Springs. By the way, I love living in Midtown!

I’ll be doing a full write up, including pics, of how I made my greenscreen in the next few days. So, stay tuned! In the meantime, if you want to learn how to chroma key using Photoshop CS4, here’s the tutorial video I watched.

Click here to view the embedded video.

When I record a video, before it’s uploaded to YouTube, it has to be encoded. By the time YouTube gets finished re-encoding it for their system, the quality has suffered. So, since I have to encode the videos no matter what I do, I’m thinking of just quitting YouTube and hosting the videos on my Silverlight hosting account.

I have a 10 gigabyte Silverlight video hosting account provided for free from Microsoft that is sitting unused. I could encode my videos for Silverlight’s specs and upload them there. The best part is that the Silverlight storage is just storage – my videos won’t be re-encoded resulting in a degradation in quality. The end result is SHARP, CLEAR videos of high quality.

Hmmm… I have some thinking to do.